Drax takes ancient trees from near my Carolina home and burns them 4,000 miles away. This greenwashing scandal utterly shames Britain
There will be plenty of backslapping among the highly paid executives of Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, at today’s AGM held in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Some of the biggest fund managers in the City will also be there, celebrating how Drax’s record £1.1billion profits have benefited them.
You might expect me, a fellow fund manager, to toast the occasion. But I will not be joining in. For the vast Drax power plant in Yorkshire is at the heart of the most egregious environmental scandal, the Big Lie of British energy policy.
Why? Drax used to be a coal power station. But it switched from burning coal to burning wood pellets – the most dirty and primitive source of energy.
Supposedly, this produces renewable electricity and eliminates carbon emissions even though the carbon footprint here is up to twice that of coal, according to scientists, when transportation and production of pellets is taken into account.
A grotesque sham because, incredibly, none of Drax’s increased carbon emissions are included in Britain’s accounts. They are deemed to be emitted in North America – even though the wood is burnt in Yorkshire.
On top of that accounting sleight of hand, there is the pretence that trees chopped down instantly regrow and are therefore renewable. In truth, this takes decades – decades our climate cannot wait. It is hideously expensive, and one reason why, as Tony Blair put it on Tuesday, current UK energy policy is ‘doomed to fail’.
Since the changeover from coal, Drax has burned the equivalent of 300million trees at its Yorkshire power station. We are all furious about the destruction of the Sycamore Gap tree. So what should you feel about 300million trees, many of them from primeval forests? And, remember, you have been forced to pay Drax £6billion in ‘green’ subsidies for this travesty.
The vast Drax power plant in Yorkshire is at the heart of the most egregious environmental scandal, the Big Lie of British energy policy, writes Louis Bacon
Even more absurd is that every single tree is imported, in diesel-powered freighters. Mostly all the way from North America.
Where is the energy security in that? Such security is on all of our minds after the blackouts in Spain this week – and a month ago at Heathrow. Drax makes a mockery of the Government’s slogan of ‘homegrown, clean energy’.
The company is by far the UK’s largest emitter of CO2. Not that you’ll hear that at the AGM today. The outfit boasts of ‘enabling a zero- carbon’ future and ‘constant, tireless action to benefit climate, nature and people’.
This is nonsense: Drax is the greatest greenwashing scandal in Britain.
I have been fighting its destruction for years, not least because many of the trees come from near my home on the Cape Fear River in Carolina. I watch the cargo ships plying the wood, commencing a 4,000-mile trip to Yorkshire. It is beyond madness.
Drax claims to care about the environment, but its real motivation is money. Its CEO, Will Gardiner, paid himself £5million a year while his company has destroyed large swathes of forest. His company is a rapist of nature.
The fund managers glad-handing him today need to realise how bad this looks. The true scale of this outrage became apparent three years ago, when BBC Panorama revealed that virgin forests in Canada were being cut down by Drax.
They got away with it for so many years because of the appalling failures of regulator Ofgem. It signed off Drax’s claims that its wood was from ‘sustainable’ forests, allowing your green subsidies to keep rolling in.
This so-called ‘watchdog’ even failed to get its act together after the Panorama revelations.
Ed Miliband risks being remembered as the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ Energy Secretary who left gaping wounds in some of the world’s great forests
It was only after seeing whistleblower evidence about what was going on that Ofgem fined Drax. The fine was just £25million – paltry given the billions it gets from the public for this charade.
From my experience in the financial world, if any bank or fund was doing anything remotely close to Drax’s ‘capture’ of its regulator, its bald-faced lying to investors about sustainability and double-dealing, that firm would have been prosecuted.
In charging vast sums for destroying irreplaceable primary forests (which Drax denies doing), the firm has sucked cash away from genuine renewables.
As for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, he was the architect of this disastrous policy back in 2008 when he headed the climate change department. He decided to ‘ramp up’ the burning of wood at Drax, promising that the trees would be ‘sustainable’.
But in February, an energy minister admitted in the Commons that Drax had been allowed to burn ‘unsustainable biomass year after year’ with officials ‘letting Drax do whatever it wanted’.
Since the changeover from coal, Drax has burned the equivalent of 300million trees at its Yorkshire plant
Miliband risks being remembered as the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ energy secretary who left gaping wounds in some of the world’s great forests. He is trying to persuade Parliament that Drax should be allowed to burn trees for another four years – and have a 13 per cent hike in its subsidies.
Many brave employees within Drax have helped expose the scandal. Principal among them is the top whistleblower Rowaa Ahmar, in charge of the company’s relationship with Government until she was sacked.
I have been proud to support Rowaa’s legal case. During her employment tribunal, she claimed Drax was telling officials that its wood was sustainable while its lawyers were admitting in internal emails that it was not.
One prize that eluded Rowaa was a KPMG report revealing where Drax’s trees come from. A judge decided to allow Drax to continue to squelch that report.
But last week the Commons’ all-powerful Public Accounts Committee came out with its own devastating report into the scandal, saying that it has no confidence in government plans to extend the subsidies Drax gets for another four years.
It found the biomass companies had been ‘marking their own homework’ in terms of compliance, that no regulatory body knew whether the wood was actually sustainable and that Drax was not value for money.
In addition, the committee said Parliament must see that secret KPMG report. The cover-up must end – the public have a right to know what is happening to billions of their money.
It is time for Parliament to question Mr Gardiner about his rapacious company and for Ofgem to salvage what’s left of its reputation by reopening its investigation into Drax. Ed Miliband has no good reason not to pause his plans to extend the duplicitous subsidies.
The Big Lie that Drax’s wood-burning is ‘sustainable’, ‘green’ and ‘carbon neutral’ has been exposed. It is a lie that shames the British Government and creates disbelief about their claims to be global leaders in tackling climate change.
Louis Bacon is an environmental philanthropist who won America’s most prestigious conservation award by the Audubon Society. He runs Moore Capital Management.
